THE USE OF ADJECTIVES IN PROSE WRITING: A STUDY OF ALIYU KAMAL'S SOMEONE SOMEWHERE

Abstract

Language is the vehicle for literature. It is along this dimension that this paper examines the use of adjectives in prose writing to account for the manner they are used in Kamal's (2018)Someone Somewhere to describe some characters in a way that his readers could visualise them. The paper has also identified the ratio at which the adjectives are used to achieve such descriptive purposes. Twenty excerpts were selected using purposive sampling. After the analysis of the adjectives used in the sampled sentences, it is discovered that one hundred and thirty-two (132) adjectives manifest in them. These adjectives conform to the classes of adjectives given by Brandford (1967), Quirk and Greenbaum (1973), Hornby (1975), Fernald (1979) and Corder&Ruszkiewicz (1985). Moreover, it is realised that while some of the adjectives come before the nouns they modify, describe or specify, others follow the nouns. It has equally been found that the novelist, Aliyu Kamal, has successfully manipulated several adjectives in the selected excerpts to that effect. It is, academically, interesting to state that the highest adjectives used by Kamal in the excerpts studied are quality, participial, emphasiser, possessive, limiting and quantitative chronologically in descending order, whereas distributive, superlative, interrogative, demonstrative and comparative are the least used adjectives. The findings of this paper signify that adjectives and other word classes could be (better taught and) rigorously studied through literary works, especially novels.